mindless hoards

The movies trained us well: drop a plague, survive the monsters, find your weapons and kill the infected in ever more creative ways; then onward to foil the conspiracy that lurks in the shadows. There’ll be more monsters, that much is inevitable. Comrades will fall to traitors, to the infected, to the corporate clean up ops, to silly accidents, to reckless infighting, to other survivor groups who are never as good as your group. Some of them will eat you. Some of them will try to force their end times religion on you. Some of them just resent your presence and will try to disappear you from their lives. None of them know better than you the best way to survive the world that is now. Nowhere is safe and everyone is out to get you. All the stories told us so.

The stories said: beware the mindless hoards, for they are legion and will overwhelm you.

The stories said: beware the monsters. If it isn’t you, shoot it. Different is dangerous. Different is threat. Different will lull you into letting it in then will strike when your guard is down.

The stories said: beware the dispossessed; they will steal your resources, corrupt your comrades, infect your people with something new.

The stories said: beware the world. Build your walls, set your traps, shrink your territory to the place you can defend. No one else matters. Nowhere else matters.

Except.

We are the monsters. We are the not-so mindless hoards. We are the different, the dispossessed, the ones outside the walls and we will not be destroyed. We will not be silenced. We will not be held back, no matter how beaten and bloody we become. We fight. We move. We talk. We scream. We increase in numbers. And when the world falls, as it has fallen a hundred times before, we build and rebuild, connect and rise, stronger, smarter, deadlier.